Dabbling in crafts

Tag Archives: halloween

I’ve been a bit absent lately, mostly due to focussing on getting the house ready to sell, which also means I didn’t have much time for crafting.

So now is a good time to catch up on my backlog of unposted projects!

I’ll start with 2 more hallloween ones, these were also made for the Country View Challenge Blog Guest Designer post, but in the end, I liked the cat the most. The 4 halloween card I made are portraied here. More information about the unicorn and cat card are in my previous 2 posts.

I actually started with the card with the portrait. I thought spooky portraits, with holes where the eyes should be and a big black void behind it, being watched (If you look closely you can see little red pupils). Somehow chess fits the evil overlord or haunted castle too, so I added the chesspiece with the checkmate words. I loved making the background and almost didn’t want to cover it.

Some steps when making that card:

splattering the cardstock

All dried up.

Start of the grame and original stamped inmage

Black eyes

Almost finished – unfortunately I don’t have pictures of the in between steps of adding the background celar embossed stamp or the other stamps on the background.

The final touches were ofcourse some white highlights and matting the card.

I really liked the fallen over chesspiece, so I went and made another card. It’s from the Chocolate Baroque Chess stamp set.

You can see the light through the card because the background is the border of one of the other cards, which I cut out carefully. I enhanced the back by a little strip of cardstock, and then added another layer (after taking the picture). But I like this effect, I should have left it uncovered.

The shoe-stamps are from VivaLasvegastamps, and I thought they looked kind of spooky here, empty shoes on a dancefloor. The fairytale of the little red shoes, but a bit spookier. (Do you hear footsteps echo through the empty hallway, hear dancing in the ballroom while no one is there?) The branches on the side are coral stamps from Chocolate Baroque and a coral stencil, I embossed alternating in red, black, red, moving the stencil just a lottile so the colours wouldn’t blend too much. I further embossed the edge of the purple card with black. (And I had embossed the chesscastle stamp, shoes, chesspiece, just lots of embossing!)

Last, a card which I didn’t finish, I thought something ancient could be spooky too. I combined two stamps from a Chocolate Baroque stamp set, (after making the background with the very light script). I made the scratched lines with something that was lying nearby.

Just using the tools at hand.

That’s as far as I got with this, I didn’t know where to go from there. I often don’t make a plan (which probably shows in my cards sometimes), but I go with the moment. But no moment came 😛 Maybe later, another time, I’ll know just the occasion and the way to finish this card or cut it up.

Materials used:

Chocolate Baroque stamp sets:
UA5SP0366 The Art of Chess A5 (chess related stamps on first two cards)
UA5SP0401 Steampunk Butterfly A5 (the bat and the lacey corner on the first card)
UA4GW0145 Antiquities (Card with the car)
UA5SP0326 Underwater Kingdom (coral branch on 2nd card)

So, finally! A few posts ago I told you about being in the top 3 for the Country View Challenge Blog. Now it´s time to share more about it! Read my introduction of the card I made at the Country View Crafts Challenge blog and then come back for more details in this post.

…

…

Are you done reading the other post yet?

…

…

I know, it’s my own fault for talking too much…

…

…

Allright then. Let the making-of begin!

The making of The BOO

After having made 3 cards I wasn’t completely satisfied with, (see my previous posts, but don’t go looking now!) I started anew. Deadline was coming closer, and I guess that pressure unleashed the good ideas. Startingpoint for this card is the word BOO. Next inspiration is actually a background I made on linen-paper for one of the other cards, it just wanted to be used.

The background. It kind of looks spooky allready. Insert noise of scratching nails here.It reminds me of the game Silent Hill I used to play. Creepy console game.

The paper was a bit too big for my design, I wanted a rectangular card not the more square card, so I cut it to size.
I am also enjoying the glow-in-the dark embossing powder, it’s not a very long lasting effect but ofcourse I could not NOT use it. BOO should be seen in the dark, so I embossed it before going on. My original idea had been a black card with only the glow-in-the-dark embossed BOO on it, but I’m just not good at CAS, so I didn’t even try making that one asI knew I’d add stuff.

The BOO making extended version

This card has been finished 3 times. With that, I mean that I thought it was finished 3 times, and the last time I was finished, I was right. So I’ve got lots of pictures of the first finish, the second, and third.
My amount of Halloween stamps is very very limited, so I was looking through all my stamps for something fitting. And thus I came across this cute cat from Vivalasvegastamps. Cute didn’t fit in my idea though, so I un-cuted it, by narrowing the eyes and adding fangs and claws, and embossing those as well with glow-in-the-dark powder.

A were-cat?

Searching through die-cuts and stamps for some bushy things, as if the cat is peeking from behind bushes. Then I remembered my dark, unfinished backgrounds with a border stamp fomr Hero Arts. Purr-fect! Inking the edges a bit with brown, moss green for a bit more darkness.

Here I had just used the Hero arts stamp

Still, it didn’t have that spookyness I was looking for. (Or rather, horror). Next brilliant idea was to use the trickling water stamp in red, as if it’s blood. Blood dripping down the card.

I also added a raindrop and waterdroplet. Both are stamps with multople drops on it. I inked up only 1 drop by masking off part of the stamp before inking. These three stamps are from Designs by Ryn

Spot the difference between the drops on this card and the end result!

Colouring the cat black with a black marker and adding some white lines for more contrast were the finishing touches. (In fact, after having taken the pictures I added a bit more lines. Pictures show more then I see while looking at the card!)

Ending of the making of The BOO

Or was it the end? I matted the card onto black cardstock, but not before stamping the background/edge stamp on the black cardstock and embossing it with black embossing powder. Just a subtle shine.

And then, the end result.

As you can imagine it was quite hard photographing the card without effect, with only the effect (like you would see in the dark) and in “dusk” light. So here is a gallery of a selection of pictures taken. (I know, it doesn’t look like it, but it really is a selection!)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I hope you liked it! Don’t be a silent ghosvisitor, make some noise: Comments are very much appreciated!

In Dutch, Hallo means hello, and ween is an (old) word for “cry”. (I cry because something sad happened. The verb “crying” is “wenen” . Ween also looks like weeën, with an extra e, and which means contractions (as in, a pregnant woman being in labour).So a bit of creativity with the words, and it says: Hello tears. Or hello painfull spasms?

Anyway, it both can be applied to my first tries in making a halloween card.

I wanted a fairy scene which is brutally disturbed by evil. Or a normally fairylike scene with some sinister twists. I have unicorn stamps, and I thought of the pretty pure white of the unicorn. Do you know the movie The Dark Crystal, with a young (and not yet arrogant and strange religion worshipper) Tom Cruise? If I rememberd right, they tried to corrupt the unicorn.

This was my first theme, a corrupted unicorn. Lured into a trap by evil, having to kill and loose it’s innocense. Covered in blood, delirious with rage it traples all in it’s path. On the card I wanted to show a unicorn that is battling bats, with the light being clear before it, but turning dark with eerie faces behind it. Evil oozes from it’s skin now.

Default colours for evil are usually black and purple, so those colours where my starting points.

You’re wondering, no pictures yet? That’s right, because I want to tell the story first, as it’s prettier then the card.

I loved the background I made. Instead of cutting it to size like I planned, I left it, with the frays of dark shadows still lingering. I ripped the end of the card (which I did with each layer on that end) to give it a torn look. Left side of the card is still good, right side is not right.

I stamped bats (It’s one of the few halloween type stamps I’ve got, from the Chocolate Baroque steampunk Butterfly sheet, (the unicorn is also from Chocolate Baroque) and partially embossed the card (putting the card in the embossing folder which was a bit inked up, and press really hard with a heavy thing on the folder on the place you want the embossing. I think I used my salt-rock lamp for that. I used the Spellbinders M-bossabilities folder Twigs and Tweets.

The ugliness came when I used glow in the dark embossing powder on it for the first time. Then, as it was ruined anyway, I tried a special effect with a skull stamp and placed that on the card as well.

Here it is in pictures:

A mask for the moon and a mask for the unicorn, and very inky fingers. See the swirls on the right? I kind of loved the look.

Blood…

I was making a crunchy blooded bat. The other bat was made out of regular cardstock, this bat was made out of tissue paper and richly embossed with black embossing powder. And then drowned drenched in blood.

So far so good. It was missing something though. So I though, hey! Let’s use this glow in the dark embossing powder! (I had ordered a skull stamp from De stempelwinkel which I wanted to stamp behind the unicorn, like skulls floating in that dark cloud behind it). But before I show you that, I show you the card on which it would be matted.

Beter. Lovely grunge look. Too bad I am going to cover it up.

I added some blood in the bloddy spots, and darkened some parts even more.

I wanted to add a bit of a bright colour into the mix, so I took tissue paper and used the other Halloween colour: orange.

Somwhere before or after this I used the glow in the dark powder on the unicorn and moon. I wanted to simulate moonlight falling on it’s nose and back. I didn’t take into account the shading or fading of the light.

A good view of the left looking floating skull.

Here is the finished card. The tissue paper isn’t glued down, but the effect is not what I hoped, it had to look a bit more wild. I guess I should have torn it instead of cutting it.The skulls were a bit bigger then I thought, so no room for several skulls.

You can sort of see the special effect of the skull here allready: One skull, the red and black embossed one, is looking to the left, while the glow in the dark one is staring at you. Embossing both wasn’t a good idea, as it melts together a bit.

EEEK! See what I mean about the gradient / fading? If only I had drawn smaller lines…

Do you know what I’ve just realized? My workname for this project was “The Nightmare”. Well, isn’t this kind of like a nightmare for crafters, to have a good idea, and a possible good card, but which is ruined because of something stupid you nearing the finishing of the card?

My next project with the Glow in the dark powder turned out lots better! Check back the next few days for that post.

I hope you this posts was helpfull to you in preventing you from making the same mistake. Happy crafting!

Deel dit / Share this:

Like this:

Looking for something?

Search

Welcome!

Hello, welcome to my blog! I am...
Debbie (nickname Daqa); the partner of a wonderful man; mother of 3 kids (2011, 2013, 2014); sister; aunt; Dutch; dog and cat lover; gamer (or should I say geek?); IT-consultant living in Bunde, Zuid-Limburg, The Netherlands. I love to try out different crafts, but mostly, I like to make paper things.

My blog is about crafting, and my life and things I find interesting. (pictures I've taken, events in my life and things or ideas I find worth thinking about). I hope you enjoy reading my blog! Still want to know more about me and my blog? Click the image!

Top 3 Country View Crafts

Top 5

Dear Viltalakim readers, I realised I haven't been checking this blog since a very long time. I just want to let you know I started a new blog back in January 2015 about Meg's rehabilitation. link can be found in the bottom. Tuesday, 20 January 2015 New blog I descided to start a new blog [...]